Iraqi Rebels Claim Gains Against Hussein’s Forces

Widespread rebellion and unrest in Iraq chewed Sunday at President Saddam Hussein’s reins of authority, threatening the major oil center of Kirkuk in the north and sending a postwar flood of refugees over the Iranian border in the south, according to rebel leaders in exile.

Sheik Abu Maitham Saghir, an Islamic fundamentalist, claimed in Beirut on Sunday that the uprising against Hussein’s rule now involved 29 major Iraqi cities and had spread over three-quarters of Iraqi territory.

Kurdish rebel leaders claimed the fall of the northern cities of Sulaymaniyah and Irbil last week, and spokesmen said Sunday that a string of towns outside of Kirkuk had fallen to guerrilla control in the previous 24 hours. The Iranian news agency quoted cross-border Kurdish sources on Sunday as saying their forces now control most of the main mountain roads in the north.

Fighting in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala turned particularly bloody Sunday as members of the elite Republican Guard, using tanks and artillery, killed 500 people, said a Shiite cleric who heads a Tehran-based opposition group.

“The latest information I received while at Tehran airport is that the Republican Guard, backed by tanks, stormed the city of Karbala, which was liberated five days ago,” the Ayatollah Taki Mudarresi said after arriving in Beirut for a three-day conference of Iraqi opposition groups. “But (on Sunday) the guards stormed the city with tanks, and according to official reports, 500 martyrs fell in the city.”

Meanwhile Sunday, in other developments:

* A Kurdish spokesman in London said Iraqi regulars have defected to the side of the guerrillas in the north. “We’re seeing whole battalions coming across to our side,” said Barham Saleh. Another Kurdish exile representative, Hoshyar Zebari, said 5,000 soldiers had switched sides or surrendered in the past few days in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

* Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, for the second time in recent days, called on Hussein and rebellious groups to strike a political deal or face a ruinous civil war on the heels of the Persian Gulf conflict. On Friday, the Iranian leader, whose own regime could be endangered by instability in Iraq, said that if the Iraqi strongman continues to try to put down dissent with force, “it will be his last mistake.”

* Convoys of U.N. and Red Cross relief supplies arrived in Iraq from Jordan with tons of food, medicine, pumps, generators and water purification systems to ease shortages in Baghdad.

Exile Claims

Details on armed insurrection in the north came from Kurdish spokesmen in London and Beirut. Their reports could not be independently confirmed, but they gained credibility from a Baghdad press campaign portraying Kurdish allegiance to Hussein.

Baghdad’s state-run television and radio have made no direct references to the popular rebellions that have exploded across the country this month since Hussein’s army was crushed by American-led forces in Kuwait. President Hussein himself has not been seen or heard in weeks. The Baghdadis are coping in a city still without power and threatened by waterborne diseases. On Sunday, the government announced that schools would not reopen as planned.

Claims of advances by Kurdish guerrillas around Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, came from exile spokesmen representing several political fronts.

“Our men are now within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the center of Kirkuk city,” Saleh, a London official of the Damascus, Syria-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, told reporters. He said advancing guerrillas--the estimated 40,000 or more fighters of Kurdish commander Masoud Barzani--had poured out of their redoubts in the mountainous north to move on the oil center. Kirkuk largely escaped the heavy damage inflicted on petroleum facilities around Basra, in southern Iraq, during the air war, according to analysts.

Sheik Saghir said guerrillas in the north had captured army helicopters and used them to shoot up a military convoy. Another exile agreed that the helicopters had been seized but said no one knew how to fly them.

The claims of continued insurrection in the Kurdish north and Shiite south mixed Sunday with new, unsubstantiated reports of trouble in Fallouja and Ramadi, two cities west of the capital, where press reports said anti-regime protesters attacked offices of Hussein’s ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party.

The blackout on news of disturbances or armed rebellions against state authority continued in Baghdad’s government newspapers and broadcast media. The extent and depth of insurrection cannot be accurately measured, but Hussein obviously has been forced to use military loyalists and police to try to stamp out popular rejection of his 12-year rule.

Many exile reports are discounted by analysts as misinformation or wishful thinking, but what truth they contain is more than the Iraqis receive from official media. The closest Baghdad Radio has come to confirming disturbances was Sunday’s programming, which broadcast songs praising the president and messages of support from Iraqi and Arab trade unions against what the announcer called “a conspiracy hatched by the U.S. imperialists and Zionists to agitate hooligans.”

If exile reports of disturbances in poor Baghdad neighborhoods over the past three days are true, the radio messages presumably were designed to confirm what Baghdadis already know.

A newspaper report over the weekend, meanwhile, appeared to concede that there is trouble in Kurdistan. Al Iraq, a daily of pro-Hussein Kurds, a co-opted minority, said all Iraqi Kurds “still adhere to the homeland in line with the Kurdish proverb: ‘Pigeons do not forget their nests.’ ”

Vice President Dan Quayle described parts of Iraq as being in chaos Sunday, but he added that the United States has no plans to take action unless Hussein’s forces use chemical weapons.

Quayle would not say what action the United States might take, commenting on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that Iraqi officials have been told that they will be held personally responsible and that “there will be serious consequences” if chemical weapons are used.

Opposition Conference

In Beirut, a spokesman for Iraqi exile groups gathering for their three-day conference, which begins today, rejected any idea of sharing power with Hussein. “He is a criminal, and we will never share power with him,” said Muwafak Rubai, representing the umbrella Iraqi National Joint Action Committee. “The minimum we ask is for Saddam to step down, stand trial, his system to be dismantled and for free general elections.”

The opposition, unable to operate in Iraq under Hussein’s brutal enforcement of the Baath Party monopoly, brings together disparate interests and ethnic groups: Kurds, Shiite Muslims, Islamic fundamentalists, Communists and nationalists. The American-led victory over Hussein’s army has given the organizations based outside Iraq the only chance they might ever get under Hussein to mobilize resistance inside the country.

They also are the sources of most of the battle reports, claiming to receive news from confederates inside Iraq by clandestine radio. “Wireless,” said Jalal Talabani, the top official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, when asked the source of his reports.

Another exile, an official of an Islamic fundamentalist group based in Iran, claimed last week in Damascus that he received his reports by facsimile machine, although fax technology is reserved only for high government officials in Baghdad.

Refugees provide information to the Iranian government and press, and Tehran newspapers have reported that more than 10,000 Iraqis have fled the rebellion in the south in the past 10 days.

“It is necessary that the government and all groups inside Iraq cooperate to calm down Iraq’s internal situation,” Iranian President Rafsanjani told the visiting Czechoslovak foreign minister Sunday. Rafsanjani said Iran has no intention of interfering in Iraqi affairs, and on Saturday, Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council, which Rafsanjani controls, warned other countries to keeps hands off as well.

Relief for Iraq

Werner Kaspar, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jordan, said the relief agency was “fighting against time to try to prevent another health catastrophe” as warming weather in Iraq raises the threat of outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and meningitis.

Aboard the Red Cross trucks arriving in Baghdad on Sunday was a water treatment system that Kaspar said could purify 8,000 gallons of water daily for the city’s hospitals. Another system with nearly three times that capacity will be sent soon, he said.

The 20-member U.N. delegation arriving in Baghdad on Sunday brought 230 tons of medicine and supplies with it.

Martti Ahtisaari, leader of the delegation and a U.N. undersecretary general, said talks with Iraqi Foreign Ministry officials on conducting a survey of the country’s humanitarian needs were to begin Sunday night.

Iraqi officials acknowledged that the destruction left by the allies’ six-week air offensive would take a long time to repair.

“We will rebuild the country just as it was before, but it will not be a very fast process,” a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press.